


Living History

by MeltingPenguins (lilmaibe)



Series: Everything you know is wrong [1]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Mindfuck
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-14
Updated: 2013-11-24
Packaged: 2017-12-29 10:40:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 10,969
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1004431
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilmaibe/pseuds/MeltingPenguins
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Teeth in the dinner, blood in the bath, axe-wielding ghosts and vanishing corpses. These are the things Sam and Dean have to face now, giving them little to no time to wonder just why they have the feeling that they've been brought back in time to follow down a different road.<br/>((Set in season 9, alternate timeline))</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> Dear reader:  
> As you will quickly notice, this fanfiction has been written by someone who lacks some in-depth knowledge of the show. I apologise for the inconvenience, and promise to try my best nonetheless. The story is set quasi after 9.1, with all events from previous seasons left untouched. Now, please hold on tight and enjoy the ride.

Night, a country road somewhere in New England.  
Dean was drumming his thumbs on the steering wheel, drawing a face as if he was short of biting it.  
"Two words", he finally hollered, instantly drawing his brother's attention, and holding up two fingers, eyes fixed in a warning glare on the road ahead. "What happened?"  
Sam sighed and combed his fingers through his hair, rolling his eyes as if he tried to follow the movement, waiting patiently for Dean to continue after the rhethorical question.  
And Dean did continue:  
"Six hours ago I was sitting with you in the hospital with you dying, and then -bam- we wake up in a Motel in the middle of Massachusetts."  
Sam leaned back in his seat.  
What they knew for certain was this: They knew they had no idea where or how Castiel was, they knew they somehow had missed how they lost Crowley, they knew the angels were pissed, but what they knew with absolute certainty was that they didn't have the slightest clue what happened.  
"Maybe it had something to do with the trial or..." Sam tried, grasping for straws.  
"Glove compartment", Dean suddenly interrupted in all seriousness.  
"What?"  
"What?"  
"You said glove compartment."  
"Did not."  
"Did too."  
"Why?"  
To avoid any further argument Sam opened the place in question, producing a neatly folded letter.  
"Probably this... 'Dear Sam, dear me’" he started reading, "Things got rebooted because you were acting like the guys that die in the Prologue. Dean'"  
"What?"  
"'S your writing"  
Dean snatched the letter.  
"Son of a... What’s that supposed to mean now?”  
“Beats me.”  
Dean’s eyes flicked between the road and the letter.  
“‘PS: If you meet E. stab him in the face’” he read before frowning “Tell you what, Sam: Next time I write a letter to myself remind me to explain things.”  
Sam was about to answer when something on the road ahead caught his attention. It was a woman, staring bewildered at the car approaching, holding something in her hand.  
“Dean!”  
There was no chance to stop in time. The Impala screeched to a hold and both brothers turned around, looking at the road behind them. There had been no sound indicating they had hit something, no impact, no nothing.  
“Dude”, Dean blinked, “We just ran over a ghost, right?”  
“I’d say so.”  
“Well”, Dean started the engine again, only to move the Impala further to the side of the road. “Let’s have a look.”  
Sam scrambled after his brother as Dean left the car, heading for the trunk.  
“Dean, hold up. What did you say in the letter? The Prologue-Guy thing?”  
But Dean had already snatched stuff from the trunk: “Prologue-Guys”, demonstratively he racked he slide on the shotgun he was holding, accompanied with a shit-eating grin, “Are short on these.”  
Sam smacked his lips and followed, armed with a gun and flashlight.  
It didn’t take long till they did find something indeed. Not a ghost, but not too far from where they had ran into and through the apparition, lay a small heap of ashes. Far too little for anything the size of a human, not really anything usual for a ghost, and especially not with bits of paper in them.


	2. Chapter 2

There was this restaurant in South Hadley, Massachusetts.  
On an usual day, it’d be a fine place to eat. People would come, people would go.  
People would not, on an usual day, suddenly jump up from their seat choking and screaming, short to throwing up, as they had just discovered a few human teeth in their meal.

“I know where we’re not going to eat,” Dean announced and heavily sat down on his brother’s motel bed, waking that one. Sam, in return, made a grunting sound, akin to ‘Wsflg?’.  
“Read this.”  
With the speed of a continental drift Sam sat up, rubbed his eyes and shook his head at his brother, before taking the newspaper Dean had thrown him.  
“‘A biting smack’,” Sam read, “‘Last Night, ‘Elliot’s Bar&Grill’ in South Hadley, was the site of a gruesome discovery as a number of guests found human teeth in their meals. As there was no evidence for a crime, the local police suspects someone playing a cruel prank on the restaurant.’” Sam frowned, still in the process of waking up. Hunter or anything else he had seen and done or not, this was no news he wanted to read on an empty stomach. The grin Dean gave him made clear that Dean was fully aware of that.  
“The best part”, Dean said then, “That’s the fifth time in a month that happened."  
Sam furrowed his brows.  
“Why exactly are you showing me this?”  
“Thought it’d be nice to know that the world’s still weird,” Dean rose again and stretched.  
Sending his brother a long, cold look, Sam shook his head again.  
“Dean, what is it?”, he asked dryly.  
Dean rolled his eyes and frowned, and sat back down on his bed.  
“It’s the fact that we’re here,” he grunted, “We ought to be somewhere else, I just know it. I mean, you should be in hospital, Crowley should be in the trunk and we should be anywhere but here. I want to know what happened, Sam. I want to know who healed you. I want to know who took Crowley. And I want to know where Cas is.”  
Dean dug his fingers into the bedsheet, glaring at nothing in particular. Not angry. Not enraged. Confused, yes. Maybe even a little bit worried. And very annoyed. He had been in this mood since they had woken up in another motel about a day back, no recollection of what happened. Then the almost-encounter of the night before had happened, and Sam had urged his brother to spent the night at the next motel, before anything else went awry. Why exactly he did that, he couldn’t tell. It wasn’t the first time he’d seen Dean in that mood after all.  
“Do you think I don’t want answers, too?” Sam responded, “When stuff like this happens…”  
He was abruptly cut off as a terrified scream rang from outside.  
Exchanging a quick and alarmed look Sam and Dean rushed outside, just in time to see a young woman storm out of her room, clad in nothing but a towel and drenched in blood.  
“That… does beat the tooth story” observed Dean, brows quirked.

The woman’s name was Hazel. She was 27, here on a holiday, and currently shaking all over, wrapped up in a thick bathrobe in the motel’s office.  
By now the police was there, too, and she was telling what had happened.  
“I just wanted to take a shower”, she had said, clutching a cup of tea, “And then there was all this blood…”  
The officer that had been talking to her, turned to her colleague as they left the building a little later, leaving the manager to take care of Hazel.  
“Same thing as over in South Hadley two weeks back”, Sam and Dean, who were standing nearby, having listened to the conversation, overheard her say, “This is getting creepy, if you ask me.”  
As the officials got back into their car, Dean nudged his brother, who had just returned from sneaking into Hazel’s room.  
“Heard that?”  
“South Hadley. The town from the papers. Dean, I checked, her whole bathroom is covered in blood.”  
“And our water was fine. Tell you what. Teeth in someone’s meal could be a prank, but water turning to blood in several places but not at all of all those places at once screams ‘get a hunter’ to me.”  
Sam nodded. “Me too. Let’s go.”

“Agents Blackpoole and Sterling, Sir”, Dean introduced himself and Sam to the man living at the house with the number 231. “Could we talk to you about your daughter?”  
There was the obligatory ‘I already told’-dialogue on the way into the living room, but once they were seated, the man, a Mister Lake (43-years old, married to Martha Lake, father of two), began to tell his story again.  
He had sat down heavily, bent forward, wringing his hands. It took him a moment, filled with frowns and head shakes.  
“Mr Lake, we believe what happened to your daughter was done by someone pulling similar pranks on various other people and institutions in the area,” said Sam, flipping open a notebook.  
“Like that thing with the teeth at Elliot’s?”  
“Like that. Please tell us what happened and what you know.”  
“Jenny’s still all shaken up”, Mr Lake said. “Can’t blame her. Have you ever taken a shower and suddenly all that was coming from the pipes was pig’s blood?-” he rubbed his forehead. “She came here for Martha’s -my wife, her mother- birthday all the way from New York. She’s a model, you know? Very busy one. But never failed to make space for our birthdays. We wanted to go out for dinner and she just wanted to take a quick shower to get ready. Martha, Toby -our son- and I had showered before and all was fine, but then… Who would do such a thing?”  
Mr Lake drew a face clearly indicating that he was trying to make sense of something that made no sense at all.  
“That’s what we are here to find out”, Dean answered, smiling a trust-winning smile.  
“I can’t help you with anything new, however. So you think there’s someone out there putting blood in water pipes and teeth in patties? That’s disgusting.”  
“Somewhat, Sir,” said Dean and rose, “Did you notice anything odd that evening?”  
“Nothing,” said Mr Lake, but then leaned back, starting to think, “That is… When we cleaned the shower then… No, I don’t think that has anything to do with that.”  
“No, please go ahead and tell us. Everything might be important.”  
Mr Lake eyed the two sitting opposite of him for a moment, before sighing, “It’s really dumb. There were burned bits of paper all over the bathroom. But they probably flew in from outside. Someone burning things or what do I know.”  
Sam and Dean exchanged meaningful looks, after which they thanked Mr Lake for his help and left.  
“Burned paper…”, Dean stated as they walked down the stairs leading up to number 231, “Just like when we ran over that ghost. Do we know any ghosts that vanish in pieces of burned paper?”  
“I’d be worried ‘bout something else.”  
“And what?”  
“That blood in the motel was not pig’s blood, Dean. And I doubt it was here either.”  
“That’s bad news. Okay, I’ll go to that restaurant and check for things there and you… Whoa!”  
Dean staggered backwards, bumping into his brother. They had just passed a small alley. There were a few other people around and it was sheer coincidence that Dean had looked that way that moment. A moment earlier or later and he, like all the others that had passed by the alley before, would have missed what lay there, covered under soggy cardboard and wooden planks.


	3. Chapter 3

“The picture we’re getting here’s nasty.” Dean leaned back on the motel bed, fiddling with his phone. “Teeth in food, blood in the shower, and women gutted like fish in alleys.”  
“Not really anything we’ve seen.”  
Sam shook his head, scrolling through the search results that had just come up. There was nothing comparable. There were many creatures hungry for human flesh, blood and guts, but none of them really ever went to collect the blood to pour it down some poor folks’ waterpipes, or put the teeth into a meatgrinder.  
“Think we found something new?”  
“That or some other bastard is having too much time on his claws.”  
“Who’re you calling?”  
Dean looked up, appearing a little miffed and a little alarmed.  
“Tried getting Kevin on the line, see if there’s anything like that in the Men Of Letters’ books.”  
“But? Is he not picking up?”  
Shaking his head, Dean dialed another number. The next moment Sam’s own phone rang.  
“Are you calling me?” Sam raised a brow.  
“Yeah. Just checking. When I try any number for Kevin, I just sit there and stare at my phone, doing nothing,” Dean rolled his shoulders “I don’t like that.”  
“Well, Victor told us not to call the bunker for a while…”  
“What?” Dean drew a face as if Sam had just announced that he’d resurrect the Archangels to start a cheese-themed wedding planner business in Denmark with them.  
“What?”  
“Victor who?”  
“What?”  
“You just said Victor said --”  
“Who is Victor?”  
“That’s what I’m asking you.”  
They sat in silence for a while, just staring awkwardly at each over. Then, almost simultaneously they shook like under a cold shower.  
“Let’s get back to the blood and teeth,” Dean said, putting the phone away and looking close to just checking his mental health by doing one of those magazin psych-tests. Sam didn’t look much better. At least till he found what he’d been looking for. Or better yet, didn’t.  
“Nothing,” he sighed and leaned back, obviously frustrated. “At least nothing violent. A number of former house owners haunting their old homes, but they all seem pretty domestic. One report’s on a ghost washing the dishes.”  
“That’s handy. Certain it wasn’t after a nice meal of human intestines?”  
“Nope. No vengeful spirits, no ghouls, no nothing that would explain what we have here,” with another sigh Sam closed his laptop and scratched his head. “What if…”, he then started, drawing Dean’s attention, “What if we’re not dealing with one thing here, but two, or three?”  
“Think that’s the case?”  
“No… no, not really. If it was there’d be stuff drawing them all here and there’d be a lot more blood.”  
“Yeah. And what now?”  
Sam’s response was a shrug, “Beats me. Guess we’ll wait till they find out who that woman you found was and then go from there.”  
“Good,” Dean leaned back against the head of the bed and crossed his arms. “In the meantime we can get back to that other question: Who is Victor?”  
“What?”  
“Look, Sam, you said ‘Victor told us not to call the bunker for a while’. That’s a damned random thing to say.”  
“I didn’t say that.”  
“You very well did.”  
“Yeah”, Sam huffed and wrinkled his nose, “Just like you said ‘Glove compartment’ the other night.”  
“I did not say that.”  
“You did and then we found a letter you wrote.”  
“I don’t like this, Sammy. What is this? Paycheck?”  
“We should just eat something”, Sam resigned, “And then get some sleep.”

Meanwhile, entirely elsewhere.

Two people were sitting together. One was the angel Hael. The other was a young man, remotely handsome, with dark skin and short black hair.  
“I suppose it makes sense,” Hael said, clutching at a cup of tea. The past days had been stressful. She felt as if… the best comparison that came to mind was a wrong but working part being replaced with a proper one in her head. She was certain she had run into Castiel. But the encounter felt more as if she had … dreamed it. But she had met this man, another angel for all she knew, who had told her to calm down and had then invited her to tea. They had had a long talk about things angelic, and the state of everything in general, and were only now coming to a conclusion.  
The man smiled.  
“As I said, it’s hard to buy that those that have to ask for a host can’t properly maintain them, while every demon can possess who- and whatever they delight.”  
Hael nodded again, sipping her tea. The other had told and shown her how to keep her vessel healthy, and explained to her that it’s never their inability to hold the power, but the angel’s sins that burn through them. Fall victim to the ways of hell and the body suffers. The stronger the sin, even if you aren’t aware of committing it, the stronger it burns.  
And he had been right.  
“And what shall I do now?”, Hael asked, placing the empty cup on the table.  
The other shrugged, “Go help people. Have some innocent fun. maybe even kick some demons back to Hell,” he smiled again. “But you should keep away from Castiel and the Winchesters. For your sake and for theirs. Hold no grudge.”  
Hael nodded. Ever since meeting this man, she assumed he must have been very high-ranking, even if she still had no idea who he was, she felt as if everything she knew was wrong.  
“Now,”, the man said, his eyes flashing dark blue for a moment, “What do you say. Shall we go to the Grand Canyon?”


	4. Chapter 4

“Agents Blackpoole and Sterling”, Dean introduced himself and Sam again, this time to the local coroner. “Could we get a look at the body found by the parking lot yesterday?”  
The doctor, a small woman with black curly hair tied up in a bun, looked at them and their IDs for a moment, before giving an apologising sigh.  
“You were there when they found her, weren’t you? If you didn’t get a look at her then I fear I have to disappoint you”, she said. When the reaction to this was a confused look she continued, “This… will sound like I’m crazy, but she vanished.”  
“Vanished?”, Dean echoed, with the additional question mark.  
“When we came into here this morning, the whole place smelled as if someone had burned something. We thought the worst, but then found everything was alright. Till we located the source of the smell.”  
“Our Jane Doe, correct?”, asked Sam.  
“Yes.”  
“And in her place you found what?”  
“Nothing but burned bits of paper. Same about her belongings.”  
Sam and Dean exchanged meaningful looks, before Dean asked for a copy of the report.

“Are you seeing a pattern here, Sammy, because I sure don’t”, Dean muttered once they were back outside, heading back for the motel. Sam was reading over the autopsy report, his brows furrowed. At first, he didn’t hear his brother.  
“Sam?”  
“Huh? What?”  
“Does this make any sense to you? All that stuff turning into nothing but burned paper? The thing on the road, the blood in the shower, now a whole corpse…”  
“And the teeth. Was in the paper this morning. ‘Evidence vanished from Sheriff’s office’.”  
“There you have it. What kind of thing does that?”  
Sam stopped and looked at his brother, “Don’t know… but…”  
“But?”  
Sam’s eyes were fixed on the report, even as they got back in the car. Something about it sounded extremely familiar to him. He just couldn’t put his finger on it. All it did was giving him a headache.  
“So what about our Jane Doe?”  
Sam made a short humming noise and summarised the report:  
“She had been punched or held down with force. Five teeth missing, slight laceration of the tongue, various bruises in the face. Her throat has been cut, large vessels on both sides severed,” he made a fitting gesture with one hand. “Then whatever killed her slashed her stomach open.” He flipped through the papers again, “But no organs missing, no bite marks, no...”  
With a huff Dean cut his brother off.  
“So again, what are we dealing with here? We have teeth in the burgers, blood in the shower, some ghost lady in the middle of the street and a vanishing mutilated corpse in an alley. And all of them go -poof- and become a pile of ash and bits of paper.”  
“Your guess is as good as mine?. But this report…”  
“What about it?”, Dean responded, driving off, back to the motel.  
“I don’t know. I think I saw it somewhere already.”  
“Are you telling me you’re having a Déjà View?”  
“Vu. And no, not like that. More like I read this in a book somewhere else once, but I can’t remember where or what it was about.”

Once again, entirely elsewhere, but not as far away elsewhere as before

There was a stack of books on late victorian England. Right next to a stack of tissues and a cup of still hot tea.  
“No, I’m fine”, a young, rather male, and very ill-sounding voice said, before its owner sniffed first and then blew his nose. “Still got some. … What? No, that idea was great,” another sniff, “Talk to you later, meds kicking in.”  
And he hung up, frowned, sneezed and crawled under the blanket again.

Further away elsewhere again

“Well, if you say so…”, the man, a farmer and actually an angel, took off his cap and scratched his head, sighing thoughtfully as the new information proceeded through his mind.  
This man -young, remotely handsome, with dark skin and short hair- had shown up about an hour ago and had talked to him about Castiel and the Winchesters. He appeared to be an angel, as well, a high-ranking one and one that had apparently done a lot of thinking.  
“The Winchesters aren’t the enemy,” the man with the oddly decorated crutch said, smiling. “If you want to get back to Heaven, I can only give you the advice I gave you.”  
“So I stay out of their way, and if that ain’t possible…”  
“Be kind. Talk. Negotiate. Be honest. You’re an angel, Ris. As such your wrath, if you feel it should be righteous, not the kind found in the Pit. You have no reason to hold a grudge against Castiel or the Winchesters. No one has. And now, farewell.”  
“Huh… Yeah… Farewell.”  
And the odd man left.

“Hah!”, Sam smiled triumphantly at his laptop.  
“Got something?”  
Dean shuffled around the table to his brother’s side looking at what that one had found. Open on Sam’s monitor was a page of some small model agency.  
“Weren’t you looking for the autopsy report?” Dean asked, grinning.  
“Yes, but I couldn’t find anything. Then I did a search on the victim from the other motel, and look at this. She’s a model. Just like...”, he switched to a different tab, “Miss Jennifer Lake.”  
“The other blood shower victim.”  
“Yes. And get this”, another tab, this time a short article, “The motel wasn’t the only place that stuff happened. There’s been another victim of a bloody bath here in South Hadley. Linda Bayfield, 67.”  
“ _67_?”, Dean squinted at the monitor in disbelief, “If she’s 67 I want to get the name of her anti-aging lotion.”  
“Dean, please,” Sam sighed, “But you might laugh: I wondered about that too. And she’s been a small town beauty queen in the 60’s. Says she’d been taking a bath and closed her eyes for a moment and when she opened them again the water had turned to blood. She suffered a heart attack and is now at the hospital, after her grandson Michael found her. He confirms the story about the bath.”  
“So two models and an ex-beauty queen. What does that make?”  
“A connection. At least.”  
“We’re dealing with a monster that’s targeting pretty women?”  
“Yes, and I hope it sticks to just turning showers and baths into blood before vanishing and leaving behind burned paper.”  
Dean raised a brow.  
“C’mon, out with it.”  
Sam sat up straight and cleared his throat.  
“I don’t know how the paper or the teeth fit into this, but have you ever heard of Elizabeth Báthory?”  
Grimacing thoughtfully for a moment, Dean smacked his lips.  
“Rings a faint bell,” he said, “Something with mass murder, wasn’t it?”  
“That’s not even half of it,” Sam opened yet another tab, “She was a noble women in Hungary, in the late 16th century. She’s said to have become a torturer and murderer before she was 14 and murdered 650 women in her time. Worse yet, she tortured and killed children for the sheer ‘pleasure’ of it.”  
“Whoa… Hello Grandma Alastair”, Dean drew a face of disgust.  
“My thoughts exactly,” Sam turned his attention back to the screen, “Due to her position she was tried but never punished for what she did, no matter how many people wanted her to pay. And now for the part she became most infamous for: It’s claimed that she had a special liking for killing young women to bathe in their blood to stay young and beautiful.”  
“And they say some celebs overdo that plastic surgery stuff. So we’re dealing with what? Vampire?”  
“Ghost, I’d say. Just one problem.”  
Dean made a ‘I-knew-there’s-a-problem’-face.  
“Which?”  
“The ghost has nothing to cling to here. The Báthorys are buried in Hungary, and there are no exhibits on her here or anything at the moment.”  
“Souvenirs from a trip to Europe, ‘cause I’m sure as Hell not flying to Hungary.”  
Sam eyed his brother, and closed the laptop.  
“Only one way to find out.”

“I don’t know,” a neighbour informed Sam and Dean after they had found the old lady’s house empty, and had asked next door if anyone knew if Mrs Bayfield had been abroad or if she knew where her grandson was. “Haven’t been in town myself. Has this got anything to do with the bloodthing? This isn’t some exotic disease, is it?”  
“We are trying to exclude that possibility,” said Dean, and the woman sighed thoughtfully, scratching her arm nervously. “It’s very, very unlikely however.”  
“I hope so. I have two small children, you know. Well, if anyone knows for certain if Linda’s been on a holiday it would be Michael, but I don’t know if he’s at school right now or if he’s got the day off to be at the hospital with her.”

“Let’s split up,” Dean said once they had gotten a description of Michael, and had driven off again, “You take the hospital, I take the school, we find what’s causing this, salt and burn it and are back at the bunker in time for tomorrow’s late news.”  
Sam agreed. A little half-heartedly however, as some things still didn’t make sense.  
And not all of them concerned the case.


	5. Chapter 5

“Can’t. Dad’s going for steak tonight”, the first girl in the group said as they walked away from the school.  
“With his new girlfriend?”, asked the second one.  
“Of course,” the first one, whose name was Joselyn, frowned. Her parents had been through an unhappy divorce earlier the year and were right now still engaged in heavy marital war. “Do you think he’ll cut mom a break and do that when it’s not her shift? She’ll be calling in sick.”  
The second girl, Allison, and the boy with them, Julian, rolled their eyes.  
“And what now? That paper’s due next week,” Allison asked. “We can’t really do stuff with anyone around.”  
“Know what? I’ll ask Dad if he can’t cancel that so mom can work. If I tell him it’s for that es-…”  
At this point Joselyn stopped mid-sentence and looked across the highschool’s parking lot. “What’s Michael doing talking to the FBI?”  
“FBI?”, asked Julian, hands now burrowed in his pockets.  
“See that huge guy he’s talking to? He was at Toby Lake’s house the other day.”  
“Why?”, said Allison.  
Joselyn shrugged. “Bet you it has something to do with what happened to Toby’s sister.”  
“Well, then that guy is asking Mike ‘bout his grandmother,” Allison shuddered.  
Indeed that guy, no one else but Sam, was.  
“What kind of ‘weird things’?”  
Michael seemed a little unwell at having brought that topic up.  
“You see,” he admitted, “My grandparents have all this weird stuff in their basement. They’re not crazy, or anything, but there’s this stuff drawn on the floor and walls, and symbols and books. Things like that.”  
Sam smacked his lips in surprise, having an idea what the boy meant, and took a note.  
“Can you remember the symbols?”  
“What’s that got to do with anything?”  
“Anything could help.”  
The boy frowned and doodled something in Sam’s notebook.  
“Or something like that,” he said when he handed it back.  
“So, when you were last in the basement, was anything different?”  
Michael shook his head.  
“No,” he said. “Well, we took a book or two from there. Old history books. For school.”  
Putting the notebook away, Sam gave Michael a long look.  
“That’d be all then” he finally said, “If there are any more questions I’ll come back to you.”  
Michael nodded and walked off.  
Sam sighed and reached for his phone.

Meanwhile, over at the hospital, Dean was sitting down at the bed of Mrs Bayfield, telling her he’d like to ask her a few questions about what brought her here.  
“She’s just going on and on about the blood”, the nurse said. Dean noticed the glare Mrs Bayfield casted at the young man at that.  
Though, in fact, Mrs Bayfield did. A bit of babbling, a bit of getting distracted. In short, she was everything but helpful.  
Dean frowned and looked away as the nurse left them for a moment, muttering ‘doddery old woman’ under his breath, getting annoyed.  
Once the nurse was gone, however, Mrs Bayfield suddenly sat up straighter, took a deep breath and quirked a brow at Dean.  
“I’m as much a doddery old woman as you’re an FBI agent.”  
Dean blinked a little taken aback for a moment, opened his mouth and closed it again, looking like a fish in the process, before reaching for his gun.  
“Oh blimey”, Mrs Bayfield continued and rolled her eyes. “Do you think I’m a demon? Monster? Ghost?” she asked, a little annoyed.  
“Well, I don’t know what you are, but…”  
“Am a hunter, lad. Well, been till my hubby and I grew too old for our taste.”  
“A hunter that grew ‘too old’?” Dean said in a voice that wasn’t buying it for a single second.  
“Everyone their own, lad. We never went for the big ones. Biggest thing we had was a duppy. In ‘83, down in Florida. We went back here and finally settled down for good.”  
“Wait, wait, wait,” Dean shook his head, a little baffled. “You’re not telling me you’re the wife of…”  
“Trevor Bayfield. I am. So, which one are you? Sam or Dean? You can only be a Winchester.”  
“Dean.”  
“Then I guess you know ‘bout that case from Bobby -rest in peace, you old bother-, right?”  
Dean took a deep breath, nodding, running a little out of steam now.  
“As for that literal bloodbath”, Mrs Bayfield then said, making Dean look up again, “You can scratch ghosts and demons off the list. There are traps and seals all over the house, with salt and iron set into the walls. But you’re free to have a look at my house. There’s a set of iron cats on the porch, the key’s under the middle one.”  
It was that moment the nurse came back. Mrs Bayfield and Dean exchanged a few harmless phrases, before Dean left, fumbling for his mobile on the way out.  
He looked at it a little surprised as it rang the moment he was about to call his brother.  
“Sam, you’re not going to believe this.”  
-I was about to say the same-  
“Okay, you first.”  
-There’s a devil’s trap in the Bayfield’s house-  
“Of course, they’re hunters,” Dean announced, nonchalantly. What followed was the sound of Sam nearly dropping his phone.  
- _What_?-  
“Linda and Trevor Bayfield. I knew the name sounded familiar.”  
-No you didn’t.-  
“Did too.”  
There was a frown.  
-So what now?-  
“Meet you at the motel. We’ll have a look at that stuff tonight.”


	6. Chapter 6

It wasn’t much later that Sam was pacing up and down in their motel room. He had arrived first and was preparing some things for the night, looking up other explanations for what had happened. He had made some calls, finding that Mr and Mrs Bayfield had indeed been hunters, and information which only brought up the major question of what had happened in Mrs Bayfield’s bathroom then. The theory about Lady Bathory had been so sound. Everything had made sense. Take a possible vampiric hungarian noble from the 17th century, have her fake her death, move elsewhere, same M.O. as before, till moving to america centuries later, kill young women and dispose of them in a meatgrinder, because modern day authorities, i.e. hunters, would not go as easy on you as folks centuries back. It had made sense. So much sense. Except for the bits with the paper. Sam still had no idea what that was about. But right now, his attention was on something else entirely.  
“The management won’t like you trampling a trench into their floor,” was Dean’s statement as he entered the room, seeing his brother like this. His grin faded when he saw the bit of smeared blood by Sam’s ear, “Sam, what...”  
“I’m fine. Don’t worry.” Sam was a bit of a mess, to say the least.  
“Dude, you’ve been bleeding out of your ear, that’s everything but fine.”  
“I know. I know. Okay, I’m confused and a little worried, but I’m fine. I can stand and walk, I can hear just fine, I’m not dizzy or anything.” He sat down at the table anyway. “Okay, maybe a little dizzy.”  
“What happened?” Dean sat down opposite of his brother, hands on the table and leaning over it for a moment.  
“I tried to call Kevin”, Sam said, running a hand through his hair, “Called other people about the Bayfields first and then wanted to see if he could find anything about what we’re dealing with here.”  
“Didn’t you tell me Victor said no to that, just yesterday?”  
“No I didn’t.”  
“And I didn’t point you to the glove compartment.”  
Sam rolled his eyes and frowned.  
“Okay now, what happened then?”, asked Dean, his voice calmer again.  
“I called, it rang, but then… there was this sound,” he sighed, “as if everyone in the world screamed at me at once. I felt like my head was exploding.”  
Dean grimaced. “But you’re alright?”  
“Yeah. Still a little dizzy, but I’m fine.” Then Sam took a deep breath. Dean didn’t miss the signs.  
“That’s not all, is it?”, he asked and Sam nodded.  
“Once my head started spinning, I wanted to gear up. I got through my bag and found this.”  
He placed a crumpled piece of paper on the table. Written on it were several lines of numbers, all crossed out, and a little skull drawn in the corner at the bottom, with a ‘No!!’ next to it.  
“That’s your handwriting,” Dean stated after looking over the paper. “What’s with those numbers?”  
“No idea. They’re too long for coordinates or phone numbers. And I don’t remember writing that.”  
Dean frowned and threw the paper onto the table, “First my letter to us, now this. What’s going on Sam?”  
“I wish I knew. At least your letter made some sort of sense.”  
“You call ‘Things got rebooted’ and ‘Stab E. in the face’ ‘making sense’?”  
“More than that,” Sam waved a hand at the crumpled note, “for certain.”  
Dean made a face. “Well then,” he said, reclining in the chair. “Let’s concentrate on what we have a clue about. What did you find?”  
“Michael said he had friends over a few weeks back, a bit before the first time teeth wound up in the town’s meat. He said he wanted to get some books from his grandmother’s basement.”  
“They’ve been dabbling in the occult?”  
“I doubt that. Michael said they were for papers for school. Plain old history books.”  
“Aha?”  
Sam shrugged. “I don’t think he’s lying. He seemed clueless about what else they found in the basement.”  
“The devil’s trap, right?”  
“And apparently some other symbols and sigils. If you’d ask me, I’d say that they accidentally broke a line…”  
“...And allowed a hungarian madwoman with her own ideas about anti-aging products into the house.”  
“And city.”  
“So, we go there, find what’s broken, and fix it.”  
“Exactly.”  
“Good. Mrs Bayfield told me where she keeps a key.”  
“Oh. Alright then. Michael should be leaving soon.”  
“Come again?”  
“He said he’ll be heading down to the airport in Windsor Locks. Picking up his parents in the morning.”  
Dean grinned. “Ain’t it nice when things are simple for a change?”  
He rose and went to get his bag. Sam looked after him, his face falling, lips pressed together. No, it wasn’t simple. Not the slightest. He grabbed the crumpled note from the table and put it into his pocket, fingers brushing against something that had been wrapped in the paper. He couldn’t tell his brother about it. Not yet at least.

“Your mom is amazing,” Julian said as they settled down at Joselyn’s house. Her mother had left for work not too long ago, despite Joselyn having failed to convince her father to go somewhere else for dinner with his new girlfriend.  
Joselyn huffed. “I’d rather say Dad’s an ass. Mom’s just trying to get through life with me.” She put down a bowl and a knife on the table, alongside some plastic containers and an old, leatherbound book. “I think we got everything.”  
“We should make it stronger this time,” said Allison.  
“Why?”, asked Joselyn.  
Allison looked away, making a face.  
“I haven’t done much with that paper yet. I mean, I saw how well this worked and…” she sighed, “I thought I’d have so much more time now.”  
Joselyn rolled her eyes, and Julian spoke before she could say anything.  
“You’re not the only one. Chris just started on his.”  
“Well, he’s ill, he’ll get more time to finish anyway,” said Allison. “But we won’t. So, c’mon, let’s do this.”  
They frowned and nodded in unison. Who would have thought that writing a paper on famous murderers would be so tedious. ‘Twas good that they found a way to make things a little easier.

“...cat in the middle…”, Dean gleamed and picked up the key. Night hadn’t fallen yet, but it was getting dark, and Michael had left a good quarter of an hour ago. The best time to have a look at Mrs Bayfield’s house.  
A quick look around and Sam and Dean slipped through the open door.  
“Mhn, sigil wallpaper,” Dean commented as he spotted it in the beam of his flashlight. “Handy.”  
In fact, the entire house appeared to be neatly built to ward of all kinds of occult entities. Sigils and seals in the wallpaper and carpet, carved into the doorframes and handrails on the stairs.  
“This is odd,” came Sam’s comment as he headed for the basement.   
“They were hunters,” Dean countered, “They knew what they were dealing with.”  
“That’s what I meant, Dean. All those traps and wards and stuff, how would anything we know get from the basement to the bathroom, wherever that is?”  
Dean turned and shone his flashlight into Sam’s face, making him raise his hand to shield his eyes. “True.” His brows furrowed and his stance changed. “Let’s split up then. I’m not in the mood for getting looked up in the basement by Starships 2.0. One of us should stay out of here.”  
He pointed his thumb over his shoulder, signaling Sam to head back up the stairs.  
The basement itself was pretty unspectacular.  
Lots of shelves, old furniture, a few tools here and there. One shelf held a grand number of old books, making it the only thing down here that looked a little out of place. Next to what was drawn onto the walls. Dean stepped closer, squinting at the lines of all the symbols around him. Nothing he hadn’t seen before. And no line broken as far as he could tell. He moved carefully around the area, examining each ward he could spot, wall, ceiling and floor alike.  
Meanwhile, Sam was looking for the bathroom, equally carefully looking at the hidden symbols on his way there. Everything seemed fine. There appeared to be no way anything could have come in here. The same in the bathroom. He looked at the mirror, considering the possibilities.

“What’re you thinking about?”, Joselyn asked, as she noticed Allison seemed distracted, fiddling with the edge of a writing pad in her lap.  
Allison looked at her, blinking for a moment. “Oh, not much. Just that FBI agent that’s been talking to Mike.”

Sam saw the flickering reflection just in time to move to the side as an axe burrowed into the wooden cabinet under the mirror. He spun around, looking at what appeared to be a madwoman with an axe.  
Dressed in an antique dress.  
With… letters moving in her eyes and under her skin.


	7. Chapter 7

A moment passed before the thing screeched and lunged at Sam, the latter managing to dodge away at the very last second. The apparition turned, the axe in the cabinet vanished, appearing in its hand again. Sam raised his gun as the thing ran towards him again, firing once, hitting, but without much of an effect. The ghostly form split where it was hit for a second, looking like ink dropped into a glass of water. Behind it, a vase burst apart. Again the thing launched itself forward, axe raised. Sam let himself fall to the ground, the apparition stumbling over him. Literally stumbling. It staggered, dropping the axe in the process, and gave a screech as it found its balance again. Sam blinked. The same moment the bathroom door was pushed open.  
“Bullets don’t work” getting back onto his feet himself Sam shouted to his brother, who, receiving that information, did the only logical thing, grabbed at the next best item and swung it at the thing. Who, for a moment, stared at him in surprise, before bursting into a small shower of burning paper.  
The brothers watched the paper fall and burn on the tiles.  
“Did I just”, Dean started, stubbornly not looking at the makeshift weapon in his hand, “Kill a ghost with a toilet brush?”  
Sam smacked his lips and nodded.  
“Well…”, said Dean, putting the item away, still stubbornly not looking, “That’s a new one,” he cleared his throat, wiped his hands on his pants, looking his brother over. “You’re alright?”  
“Yeah.” That said, Sam kneeled back down, picking up a bit of the paper.  
“Wasn’t that Lizzie Borden?”, Dean asked, rather angry and a little confused, before turning his attention to the cabinet. “I thought that was a possession thing.”  
Sam was leafing through the papers carefully, while Dean ran a finger over the crack in the cabinet, whistling through his teeth at the size of it.  
“This is bad,” he said, shaking his head. The corpse they had found the other day might have vanished, which probably meant it was part of whatever it was that was going on, but if a mark such as this remained, it was easy to imagine that people were in danger should this thing not get stopped.  
“This is greek,” Sam suddenly announced, drawing Dean’s attention away from the gash in the cabinet.  
“What?”  
“Greek. Ancient greek on top of that,” Sam’s eyes widened as an idea hit him.  
“Sam?”  
“Yes?”  
“You look like you just discovered the meaning of life. Mind sharing it?”  
Sam closed his mouth and swallowed, before clearing his throat. “I think I know what we’re dealing with.”  
“Well, if that was Lizzie Borden and that Bathory woman is in the mix too, we…”  
“It’s not demons, Dean.”  
“Then what is it?”

Not too far away, over at one of the town’s restaurants, a young woman was standing alone in the bathroom, washing her hands. She was currently contemplating leaving the restaurant early, as she couldn’t stand her new boyfriend constantly making his ex-wife’s life hell. She sighted and reached for a paper towel.

At the same moment, Joselyn, notepad in front of her, gnawing on a pen, complained about her father’s new girlfriend.

The woman in the bathroom, her name was Christine, caught a glimpse of the odd reflection in the mirror just in time. It was a man with a moustache, half bald, dressed in clothes from the turn of the previous century, an odd mark around his neck and a hatchet in his hand. The woman’s attention was on the weapon immediately, but she did notice the odd figures running under the man’s skin. She gasped as the man attacked her, dodging away and kicking her heel into his side. The figure grunted and turned towards her again, but suddenly it seemed distracted. It vanished. Christine gasped, eyes narrowed, waiting for another attack.

“Know what’s the worst thing is?”, Joselyn frowned, taking a long gulp from a cup next to her, “She’s not that bad, actually. It’s all dad’s fault.”

There was an uproar from outside the lady’s room. Crashing of glass and plates and chairs and several loud voices and screams. Christine ran out of the bathroom, gasping at the sign before her. The main hall of the restaurant was a mess and in the middle of it was the strange man from before, viciously attacking her boyfriend, while other guests looked on in terror, some probably thinking this was some cruel prank. It wasn’t until his ex-wife suddenly stormed onto the scene, swinging an umbrella like a baseball bat and bringing it down on the odd man’s head with full force. Something odd, odder and weirder and only a little less unsettling than the scene before, happened: The odd man vanished, leaving behind nothing but a small pile of ash and bits of burning paper.  
It took a moment, till someone in the crowd yelled for someone to call an ambulance.

The phone rang. Joselyn rose, rubbing her head as she had suddenly gotten a mild headache, and picked up the receiver. Allison and Julian looked at her, watching her face losing all colour all of a sudden.  
Shaking, she hung up and turned towards her friends, words stuck in her throat.  
“What’s wrong?”, Julian asked.  
“It’s… it’s dad…”, Joselyn found her voice, although it was weak, “Someone… someone tried to kill him at the restaurant,” she suddenly turned, grabbing her jacket, “I need to go to the hospital…”  
Completely forgetting all other things her friends rose from their work, notepads, pens and a bowl of a glimmering liquid getting left behind as they raced out of the house.  
As the door fell shut behind them, a young woman appeared on the foot of the stairs. She was small, with dark olive skin, an updo, well dressed, clutching a clipboard and currently biting her lower lip as if she was really, really worried.

“I’m fine, Sammy. Forget the hopsital,” Dean grunted, holding his ear and resting his head against the dashboard while Sam raced the Impala through the streets.  
Sam had explained what he thought they were dealing with here. Which brought up a whole new problem. They had no idea how to deal with things now. They had similar opponents in the past, but that wasn’t saying much. Everything remotely from the same page of the big book of supernatural buttheads was a bitch to take care of. Then Dean had tried calling Kevin for assistance -as the local libraries were already closed- despite him and Sam agreeing that it might be a bad idea after what had happened to Sam earlier the day. They were wrong about this call having the same effect as it had on Sam. It was worse.  
Now Dean was pressing a towel against the side of his head. Oddly enough, despite the amount of blood, he was otherwise fine, just really dizzy, with only a bit of bad hearing. He hadn’t noticed that he had collapsed and was out for several minutes after the attempted call.  
“You were out for a whole five minutes, Dean,” Sam retorted, letting the motor roar, “We get you to the hospital, see what’s going on, and then… whoa!” An ambulance nearly cut them off, followed by a small, dark green car.  
They reached the hospital a few moments after the ambulance, just in time to spot an odd, olive-skinned woman suddenly appeared and disappearing just as fast, looking after the man that was hurried into the ER.  
Now they had two reasons to be here.

Once again, entirely elsewhere.  
“I found it curious to have not run into any angels yet,” Castiel said, after swallowing a great bit of steak and baked potato. Opposite of him, and paying for the dinner, sat the angel Hael, watching him with a bit of amazement.  
“So, tell me,” Cas continued, “This other angel you mentioned.”  
Hael shrugged. “I don’t know who he was. But as I said, he was very powerful.”  
“And he showed you how to heal your vessel?”  
Hael nodded. “May I?” She reached over, snatching a slice of cucumber from the salad next to Castiel’s plate, nibbling lazily on it. “He was… just plain odd. No one I ever saw in Heaven. But he said I musn’t harm you should I run into you. Or the Winchesters.”  
Castiel looked up from his plate again, burping softly, earning a bewildered look from Hael. Being human was really something that would take time getting used too.  
“Can I ask you something?” Hael then said, leaning back in her seat. “What happened?”  
Now Castiel put the cutlery down.  
“Metatron lied to me about his plans for Heaven and Earth and Hell. He said he was going to fix everything, when in fact he intended to break it all,” he sighed, “All out of revenge for…” Castiel stopped, suddenly looking confused to his very essence.  
“Hael, tell me something, can you actually remember the Metatron ever leaving Heaven?”


	8. Chapter 8

Joselyn was devastated. Her mother had just told her what had happened, and she didn’t know what to make of that. There was the fact that her dad had been attacked and was currently fighting for his life, but the story as a whole didn’t make any sense.  
“But it’s crazy!”, Joselyn exclaimed as she, Allison and Julian snuck off to a quiet little corner to talk. “People don’t just get up and disappear.”  
Julian rolled her eyes. “Jo, we’re writing homework using some greek voodoo. Disappearing crazies are totally below that on the ‘weird’ scale.”  
Joselyn frowned, bit her lips. The same moment Allison grimaced in desperation as he remembered something.  
“Shit! We forgot the stuff. Your mom’ll going crazy if she sees that.”  
The other two made a similar face, a general illustration of the word ‘fuck’. Allison was about to say something when somewhere nearby someone shouted, and the three of them scrambled to get away from possible trouble and back to Joselyn’s home before her mom did.

The woman with the clipboard hadn’t noticed Sam and Dean. She was too busy keeping an eye, not on the man that had been raced here, but on his teenage daughter and her friends. She adjusted her cardigan, and followed them silently to an empty corridor in the building. She sighted, raised her hand… and almost screamed as someone much taller than she was grabbed her wrist.  
“Hey! Leave’em alone,” Sam grunted, holding her arm.  
A doctor had given Dean a quick check-up, declared there to be no greater injuries and that he couldn’t explain the blood. Then he had looked at Dean and Sam as if the two were pulling his leg. While he gave Dean a more thorough check-up (the blood had to come from somewhere, after all), Sam went to pay Mrs Bayfield a visit, asking her about the matter at hand, trying to find the woman they had spotted at the entrance. Only to run into her on an empty corridor, spying on a group of teenagers.  
Much to his surprise, the woman seemed mortally frightened of him.  
True, he had seen monsters actually being scared of him and Dean, they had a reputation after all. But not like this.  
“My end you will become, will you not?” the woman finally spoke, holding up the clipboard like a shield, peeking over it, “As you are a Winchester and in my responsibility, albeit not in my intention, it lies that a man is at the verge of death.”  
Sam was a little taken aback by the prose.  
“You nearly killed a man and now you are after those teenagers.”  
“I did not harm the elder. It is not to my liking. And those did not adhere the rules.”  
“So you’re going to punish them?!”  
“No… no. Gracious gods, I will not,” the woman looked at Sam, shaking her head. “Just remove the desire to further use what they should not have used at all.” She then looked around the corner, making a devastated sound as she found the teenagers had left, probably after being alerted by Sam’s words.  
“I must leave and find them.”  
And she was gone.

It would have been much of a surprise if Dean would have actually listened to the doctor’s order to lie down for a bit after the check-up was through. At the first possibility to head out, he had headed out, and up the stairs, to meet his brother at Mrs Bayfield’s room. Not that Sam had been there. In fact, Dean ran into him just in front of the room.  
“I lost her,” Sam admitted, a little out of breath.  
“What?” Dean grunted, pulling his brother around a corner to get out of plain sight.  
“I saw her stalking some teenagers, but she vanished.”  
“Dammit, Sam!”  
“What was I supposed to do? I told you bullets do nothing. And this is a hospital.”  
“Find the teenagers, maybe?”  
“And then what?”  
Dean smacked his lips and, after a quick glance around, slipped into Mrs Bayfield’s room.  
“You’re back pretty fast,” she greeted Dean, sitting up in her bed, putting what she’d been reading to the side. Then she eyed Sam. “And that must be Sam. Nice to meet you.”  
Sam smiled back, a little awkward for a moment, while Dean closed the door behind him.  
“We don’t have much time, ma’am,” he said.  
“What do you know about muses?”, Sam added.  
Mrs Bayfield raised a brow. “Muses? Is that what’s going on here?”  
“We think so,” Sam answered, “One seems to be behind the things happening lately. And she’s currently after some teenagers.”  
“Last time I met one they were anything but a threat,” said Mrs Bayfield.  
Sam and Dean looked at each other.  
“You met one?”, asked Dean, a little baffled.  
“Two, actually. Years and years back. Polyhymnia and Euterpe. Nice girls. Were constantly singing while speaking. ‘twas a bit of a musical that case, I tell you. Can’t blame them, though,” Mrs Bayfield stretched, “We ran into them after two rivaling composers tried to best each other with their aid, but then went and summoned some demons when things didn’t go fast enough. It was a mess.”  
“Did you,” Sam started, approaching the bed and sitting down on a chair next to it, “know how they summoned the muses?”  
“It was in another hunter’s old diary one of them found, from what we know,” Mrs Bayfield narrowed her eyes and knitted her brows, before frowning aloud. “Blimey!”  
“What?”, came the response in unison.  
“You probably saw my basement, right? All the books?”  
Dean nodded.  
“When Trevor and I decided to settle down”, Mrs Bayfield continued, hastly “We gave most of our books away. Those no one wanted or need we put in the basement with all the other old books,” she rolled her eyes, “Thought they’d be safe. One of them was exactly that book. Now, those teenagers you mentioned. Two girls, two boys by chance? One of the girls with pink strands?”  
“I only saw three,” Sam said, “but yes, that fits one of them.”  
“That’s some of Michael’s friends. That girl is Joselyn. They’re having to write something for school. I guess Mike took the book from the basement not knowing what he had there.”  
Again Sam and Dean glanced at each other, alarmed.  
“That was the girl whose father was attacked,” Dean said, also alarming Mrs Bayfield in the progress.  
“What?”  
“When we came here that girl’s father was being raced into the ER.”  
“That’s not good.”  
“That’s not all,” exchanging glances with Dean, Sam started telling Mrs Bayfield what happened at her home and what they heard here at the hospital, making Mrs Bayfield shake her head rather confused.  
“If a muse is the cause for that, something’s seriously amiss,” she said. “Told you they aren’t that vicious.”  
“But something is, and that thing is at least a key element.”  
Looking at Dean, Mrs Bayfield shook her head.  
“You can’t kill a muse. You’d destroy what she embodies. That’d be like killing Time, or Fate, or Death. And from what I know you two met that old bother. But I can give you the kids’ address, maybe you’ll find out what’s going on.”  
She did, and Sam and Dean were off again.

“What do you mean, gone?” Allison almost hissed.  
They had arrived at Joselyn’s house a few minutes before and decided that pouring their ‘greek voodoo potion’ down the drain would be a waste. Only to find the bowl all three of them _knew_ they had left in the middle of the coffee table gone. Along with the book they had the spell from.  
“But that’s impossible,” Allison continued.  
“I know,” said Joselyn. “Mom’s gonna kill me. She made that bowl herself.” She looked at her friends. “Did we really leave it on the table?”  
“I don’t know, actually,” said Julian.  
“Neither,” said Allison. “I mean, when you said your dad’s at the hospital, things got messy.”  
“Let’s look for it then. Has to be somewhere.”  
And they started searching.

The Impala screeched to a halt outside Joselyn’s house. The boys got out and snuck closer to the house in the dark.  
“No sound of people getting brutally slaughtered,” Dean said, peeking into the window, “That’s always a big plus.”  
“They’re still making a lot of noise.”  
“They are looking for what they should never have had as they had it and what I took from them,” sounded a voice behind them. Sam and Dean spun around, facing the being they were looking for. She was holding a small stone bowl and a book.  
“Might I borrow your lighter?”, she asked.  
“What?” Both Winchesters had instinctively reached for their weapons (even though they still had no clue how to actually go about the general situation of this case) but stopping when the request proceeded through their ears.  
“I would like to burn this brew and end this reckless dream of dark,” the woman said, “Therefore please forfeit your intentions of ending me.”  
The boys lowered their hands a little baffled.  
“What is that?”, asked Sam, and in response the woman handed him the book.  
“The 512th page,” she said.  
Sam flipped to the page in question, reading.  
“Oh,” he said, and fumbled his lighter from his pocket.  
“What?”, Dean interrupted him and peeked onto the page, before he went ‘Oh’ as well, and let Sam hand over the lighter.  
“So, you’re a muse?” Dean asked, once the substance in the bowl was burning softly in a secluded spot by the Impala. The woman nodded. “Sam here said you must be one of the writers,” Dean continued. Which one are you, Clio or Cassiopeia?”  
“Calliope,” Sam whispered, leaning towards his brother.  
“What?”  
“Calliope’s a muse.”  
Dean thought for a moment. “Cassiopeia was Momo’s turtle, right?”  
Sam nodded.  
“I am Clio,” the muse said.  
“Well then, Clio,” said Sam as the flames died off slowly. “What exactly happened here?”  
“They searched knowledge on those that took pleasure in slaughtering their kin and found the book you hold.”  
“‘They’ are those teenagers in there, right?”  
Clio nodded and explained. In a way that gave the brothers a little headache by the looks of it.  
“Just so we’re on the same page here”, Dean then said, making a face as if he was still not buying it. “Those kids in there were writing an essay. On serial killers. And they went to Mrs Bayfield’s house cause looking for history books, found this instead and then went, casted that spell, which called you so you would do their homework for them?”  
Tilting her head a little Clio nodded once more.  
“I believe that was what they desired.”  
“But that spell was meant to be used before sleeping, so they’d dream about that stuff and while they do an enchanted pen would write their essay. But because they didn’t sleep you made that stuff appear in reality, and then they made the potion stronger and thought of Sammy, and that guy, so the serial killers appeared and attacked them.”  
“That is correct,” Clio said, and Dean rubbed his temples.  
“Moral of the story,” he frowned, “If the package says ‘Take before sleeping’ take it before sleeping.”  
“Wait,” Sam suddenly interrupted, narrowing his eyes, “You listed four serial killers. Lizzie Borden, Elizabeth Bathory, Carl Grossman and Jack the Ripper. That means four students. But I only saw three. What did you do to the fourth?”  
“The same I intended for those three and what I shall do now.”  
Automatically Sam and Dean got back into an attack stance, and Clio made a step away from them, raising her hands defensively.  
“Oh, no. No,” she said. “I did not harm him. He has fallen ill and I visited him, taking the potion and the memory of its existence from him. That is all I shall do to those three.”  
Then she vanished, appearing at the door of Joselyn’s home across the street a moment later, ringing the bell. When the door was opened, it all happened very fast. Clio handed the bowl (now filled with popcorn) to Joselyn, who had opened and then there was a small sound, as if a violin’s string was plucked, and Joselyn looked confused, and closed the door again.  
Clio skipped back over to Sam and Dean, smiling.  
“All is well now,” she said. “I shall return to my realm, and ask Asclepius to aid the man this dream of dark brought close to death.”  
“That’s good,” said Dean, hands on his hips. “We’ll let you go this time. But if you’ll ever cause trouble…”  
Clio chuckled.  
“I shall not do so. But should you need my aid, you now hold the means to call my sisters and me forth. And now, farewell and take good care, for I can see how great the history before you is and isn’t.”  
And then she was gone.  
“What the hell was that supposed to mean?”, Dean grumbled.  
“I was going to ask the same thing.”

Several hundred miles away, Hael looked up from the book she’s been reading.  
“What’s wrong?”, asked Castiel. They had decided to share a hotel room, as Hael had the feeling she had to keep Castiel safe from other angels that, she felt, had not understood the lesson she had learned by now.  
“I don’t know,” Hael closed her eyes, concentrating. “But I think,” she said, opening her eyes again and making a confused face, “there’s a pirate station broadcasting on angel radio.”

“Once we’re home we need to get Kev and celebrate,” Dean grinned, as the Impala drove down a road outside South Hadley, the starry sky above, “We don’t have cases like this too often. Everyone living and stuff.”  
Sam made a murmuring, but agreeing sound, flipping through the pages of the spellbook Clio had given them.  
“Anything interesting?”, asked Dean.  
“If by interesting you mean confusing, then yeah, the whole book.”  
“What?”  
“The spells seem alright, as far as I can tell,” Sam shook his head, “But… get this: ‘Be wary of those that say to be angels but bear the names of the prophets of old and the kings of older. They do not lie that they came from Heaven, but far from home are they often now.”  
“What’s that supposed to mean?”  
“I know,” Sam closed the book and turned it around carefully. “I feel like we've got more questions than answers right now.”  
“Chin up, Sammy. We get back to the bunker, and see what we find. I mean, we have an old book, a letter and a few weird numbers. Can’t be that hard to explain that.”  
“I don’t think we’ll find all answers at the bunker.”  
Now Sam was worrying the hem of his sleeve.  
“What’s the matter?”, Dean asked, seeing his brother lean against the window like that.  
Sam sighed through his nose, not answering for a moment.  
“Fine, don’t tell me,” Dean shrugged, concentrating on the road again. It was then that Sam, without a word, pulled something from his pocket, holding it up.  
Dean nearly steered the Impala into the next tree.  
Once the car stopped, a little askew at the side of the road, Dean stared at the item in his brother’s hand in utter disbelief. It was a very, very particular amulet.  
For several moments Dean’s mouth opened and closed again, as he was obviously looking for something to say, while Sam stoically avoided his eyes.  
“Remember the note I showed you”, Sam finally said, still not looking at his brother, even as Dean took the amulet, moving it between his fingers, “This was wrapped in it.”  
“You’re shitting me. C’mon, Sam, this is a lookalike you found somewhere.”  
Now Sam did look at his brother.  
“And where?”, he asked, “Dean, we haven’t really been anywhere where I could’ve found that.”  
Dean went silent, leaning onto the steering wheel.  
“What’s going on with us, Sammy?”, he asked, staring into the distance.  
“Wish I knew.”  
“Well,” Dean then grinned, slipping the amulet around his neck, “Then let’s find out and kick the ass of whoever’s behind it.”  
The motor roared, and BTO’s ‘Hey You’ played on the radio.


End file.
